Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Symantec Sells Its Stake In Huawei-Symantec Joint Venture

Huawei just announced that it's buying Symantec's interest in their joint venture Huawei-Symantec (HS). This is a very interesting turn of developments for a joint venture that I've been railing against for most of 2011. Six months ago, Symantec CEO Enrique Salem said he either wanted to increase Symantec's stake in HS or sell shares to the public via an IPO. Then in October, he added the additional option that Huawei may buy Symantec's shares. Today, that's precisely what happened. My question is, what happened between May and October to make CEO Salem change his mind?

Could it have been this Washington Times article last August about how four Senators and a Congressman were asking the Departments of Defense and Energy to look into the sale of H-S parts to a government research lab at the University of Tennessee? Or perhaps it was the release of an Open Source Center report on Huawei's Chairwoman Sun YaFang's past with the equivalent of China's CIA, the Ministry of State Security?

Or perhaps it was that the ludicrous nature of the relationship between a Chinese company with State affiliations and a security company who's supposed to protect their customers from espionage activities from that same State finally sunk in to Salem's brain? No, it probably wasn't that.